The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (66 page)

‘Of course she was hysterical, she was naked and three strange men had turned off the lights and were chasing her,’ I said.

‘One of them, Ho I think, grabbed her but she was wet, slippery, and she pulled away and slipped and fell. Through the window. It was all a mistake, a tragic mistake. I can only repeat, they were not trying to kill her. That is not what I wanted.’

‘Whatever you wanted, Mr Kaufman, that was the end result,’ said Lai.

Kaufman fell silent again, pondering like a grandmaster planning his next move.

Lai leant forward, his upper body curved over the table. ‘And let us not forget Tod Seligman. Was the bomb in his car just your way of asking him to keep quiet, Mr Kaufman?’

‘And what about the men who tried to kill me in London,’ I said, but once more I was ignored.

Kaufman took the salt cellar and tapped it gently against his cheek before placing it on the tablecloth.

‘Let’s cut the bullshit, Lai. It’s time to put up or shut up. I might not be able to stop you taking over my company but I’m fucked if I’m going to grovel in front of you. If I lose the company the Ningbo operation doesn’t matter one way or another. So what are you going to do, Lai? Go to the police? You can’t prove a thing.’

Lai nodded thoughtfully, as if considering Kaufman’s outburst.

‘I do not need proof, Mr Kaufman. All I need to know is what happened. And now we know everything.’

Kaufman said nothing, he just looked Lai straight in the eye and waited for him to make his move. The two sat staring at each other, locked in a silent tableau of hate as the restaurant hummed around them. It was Lai who broke first, but it wasn’t because he had weakened under the other man’s menacing stare, it was to reach for a thin burgundy leather briefcase by the side of his chair. The gilt locks cracked open together and he removed a large manila envelope which he put by the side of his plate before relocking the case.

‘That’s your proof, is it?’ asked Kaufman.

‘No, Mr Kaufman. My proof is a conversation I had with two men in a factory in the New Territories.’ He rapped the envelope with the knuckles of his right hand. ‘No, this isn’t my proof.’

He bared his teeth and his eyes gleamed with naked hostility and it was suddenly obvious how much he was enjoying making Kaufman wait, like a cat tormenting a mouse.

He slowly opened the envelope, his eyes never leaving Kaufman’s face as he drew out a sheaf of papers interspersed with black and white photographs. He took the top sheet and handed it to Kaufman. As it passed in front of me I saw there was a picture of a smiling blonde girl clipped to one corner of what appeared to be a CV, ordered lines of type detailing her career.

Kaufman frowned as he read it and studied the picture. ‘Am I supposed to know her?’ he asked, genuinely puzzled.

‘Elizabeth Richardson, your second cousin. You’ve never met her. A sweet girl, she’s studying to be a PE teacher at Loughborough.’

Before Kaufman could speak, Lai handed over the next sheet and photograph. A balding middle-aged man in a tweed jacket. His CV was about twice as long as the girl’s. Now Kaufman looked even more puzzled. ‘You’ve never met this one, either. Roger Wolfendale. Another distant cousin. His computer business in Ireland is about to win a big order from Germany, I understand. He seems to be doing well.’

Lai started giving Kaufman the rest of the reports in quick succession, summing up each one in a few words, a shop assistant, a lawyer, a Jaguar salesman. There was one common thread, they were all related to the tycoon, starting with distant relatives like the blonde girl and the balding man on the outskirts of his life and working steadily to the core, to his mother in Newton Abbot, his son, Simon, and two daughters, his five grandchildren, and finally his wife. By the time Lai had finished there were thirty-one people’s lives laid out in front of Kaufman on the white tablecloth. He looked down at the faces of the men, women and children who meant the most to him in all the world, the human beings who carried in their cells the same genes that made him what he was. He looked down and he understood and when he finally raised his eyes they were filled with haunted fear, the look of a loser who knew he had lost.

Lai didn’t have to say anything else, he didn’t have to take Kaufman by the scruff of the neck and rub his nose in it like you would a dog that had soiled the carpet. He didn’t have to, but he did, slowly and methodically, his eyes fixed on the industrialist.

‘I want only one thing from you, Mr Kaufman. I want your life.’ He paused, and it was for dramatic effect, no other reason, and I remembered the look of satisfaction as he lit the blow torch in the New Territories.

‘You have exactly two weeks from today to take your own life or I shall begin to hurt every single one of your living relatives. Then I will kill them. One at a time. And when I have finished with them I will start on you.’

Kaufman began to shake his head slowly from side to side, he was breathing so heavily it sounded as if he was snoring and his cheeks were reddening.

Lai leant forward and pointed his right forefinger at Kaufman’s sweating face, jabbing in time with his words. ‘You have no alternative, Mr Kaufman. No alternative.’

Lai leant back in his seat and held out his arms, palms of his hands upwards and shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t care how you do it,’ he said. ‘But let me make one thing abundantly clear. I don’t want the police to find charred ashes in a burnt out car or a pile of clothes and a wallet by the side of the Thames. Do you understand, Mr Kaufman?’

Yes, Kaufman understood, and so did I. Lai wanted a life but more importantly he wanted a body, and maybe even a grave to dance on.

‘My company will announce its bid for Kaufman Industries within the next forty-eight hours. If you are still alive twelve days after that . . .’ He let the sentence hang and shrugged again, the Marlon Brando school of theatrics. I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.

Kaufman was sitting ramrod straight in his chair and from the look on his face it was obvious that his mind was racing, running through all the various combinations and permutations that might lead to a way out, a grandmaster trying to come up with a lifesaver with checkmate only one move away, plenty of options available but all leading to the same result. For a fleeting second his mouth opened as if he was about to speak, but then he clamped it shut.

You want to know what terror is? I’ll tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t being chased through a dark, empty house by an old lady with a carving knife, or walking through a misty graveyard on a moonless night and hearing a tomb creak open. Terror isn’t creatures from the deep, or monsters from outer space, that’s fantasy, teasing your imagination with things that might happen but never do.

You want to know what real terror is? It’s when a middle-aged Chinese businessman with a half eaten piece of lemon meringue pie in front of him and crumbs on his upper lip tells you that you are going to die and you know there’s not a thing in the world you can do to prevent it, to know that you are going to be dead in two weeks’ time, and that if you are not then every member of your family will be killed and then your life will be taken anyway.

Terror is when you look into the cold brown eyes of a man who wants you dead and you know that he means it, that the eyes aren’t going to crinkle into a smile and tell you that he’s joking.

That’s real terror, and that’s what was facing Kaufman as he sat in the Grill Room of one of the world’s top hotels amid padding waiters and clinking cutlery. I thought he was going to say something, to beg or to threaten, but no words came. He stood up abruptly, and his chair keeled over backwards as he leant across the table and slapped Lai across the face, hard, the sound cutting through the restaurant like a pistol shot. Heads whirled round and a waiter scampered over to retrieve the chair and Kaufman was the centre of attraction as he walked quickly to the door, head held high.

Lai sat in silence, seemingly oblivious to the curious stares of the customers and staff as he slowly gathered up the photographs and slid them back into the envelope.

‘Would you really do it?’ I asked him.

‘Do what?’ He replaced the envelope into his case, avoiding my eyes.

‘Hurt his family. Would you do it?’

He smiled. ‘I won’t have to.’ His left cheek was flushed from the slap, and he reached up to stroke it gently. ‘It’s enough that he believes I will. And you saw yourself that he knows I am not bluffing.’

‘But did you mean it? If he doesn’t . . .’ I couldn’t finish the sentence, I was as terrorized as Kaufman, though I doubt that I could have managed the same aloof exit that he’d made, my legs were shaking under the table.

‘Does it matter?’ he asked.

Yes, you cold callous bastard, of course it fucking matters, I thought. It matters that you could threaten thirty-one people you’d never met and who had never done you any harm. That was what I thought, but I just pulled a face and said no, I guess not, and finished my ginger ale as Lai gestured for the bill. I left before it arrived and I didn’t say goodbye.

Kaufman’s body was found two weeks later, in the bedroom of his Suffolk farmhouse. He’d sent his wife to London on a weekend shopping expedition and retired to bed with a bottle of twelve-year-old malt and a bottle of sleeping tablets. There was no note.

In a way I suppose it was poetic. It started with a suicide that was obviously murder, and it ended with a murder that actually was suicide. But I didn’t want to think about that too closely, it was a train of thought that would rush me into a dark tunnel where I was afraid to go just then. I went out and got drunk. Two months, one week and six days. A record. Jenny was not amused, but she forgave me. Eventually.